Karl Holmqvist interview
On Saturday night you were reading the newspaper Old News as a performance. What were you doing reading it to a public?
It can sometimes be intimidating to come to an exhibition space such as this so it can be a good idea to offer ways in for the public or people. And we’ve done that with the publications, lamps made of newspaper, we made newspaper tables, sofas and furnishings of different heights. The last thing was to read aloud the newspaper articles that were cut out and collected by various people for this project. Since I have this great talent for language I was able to read the articles in three different languages.
It’s like making an identification with other readers that are there in the audience?
If I don’t have anything specific to do I read several papers a day sometimes, travelling … in airports. I like it because you skip from one thing to another, through sections. Some people start at the back with the sports. It’s also nice if you’re travelling somewhere different and you’re not familiar how a paper is divided, you just go from Health to Crime to Sports to Politics to Culture, I like that. I was also invited by Jacob to include my own clippings, the articles I cut out had very specific things in them, but more than this I also wanted to create a seemingly random trajectory, going from this to that. I have the impression articles are getting shorter. If you read something like Frankfurter Allgemeine with articles that will sometimes stretch from one page to continue on another, then you might read something else in between. I wanted to share that random non-linear type of logic as part of the performance.
It seemed to have something to do time too, old articles now, you also read in a way with a kind of lagging or sagging in your delivery.
If I had been a professional news reporter it would have lacked something, I was just trying to find another way of using these articles. Yes the readings are from 2004 and 5 and it’s a contradiction to read them. With television it’s somehow seen as something useful to keep yourself updated. If you’re reading from two years ago, it doesn’t make sense anymore and I quite like that. It’s senseless to read something that was full of meaning. Also this exhibition room is overloaded, with a normal painting show you could see everything in twenty minutes but you could be stuck here for a week to read everything. This is another kind of sagging or gagging or whatever you said.
Yes, it seemed like this exhibition and reading was offering the beginning of tools to deal with the excess of information and articles that we are all living with?
There was a threat I might go on for hours, but it was quite manageable time-wise. It was stretched enough to give that impression without actually doing it.
Did you figure an audience in this performance?
Artists have a popular role historically as crazy people, yet this newspaper craziness goes beyond that of artists. Especially older men, like in retirement, maybe younger women, have a craze of cutting and collecting articles, I’m not sure if they know about this exhibition, but people are widely aware of and understand it as an activity and process. It’s a conceptual work without that specific conceptual art context that could prove to be alienating to those already in the article cutting group or activity. It can be anybody, initiated or not, everybody is welcome.
back to SPEECH
It can sometimes be intimidating to come to an exhibition space such as this so it can be a good idea to offer ways in for the public or people. And we’ve done that with the publications, lamps made of newspaper, we made newspaper tables, sofas and furnishings of different heights. The last thing was to read aloud the newspaper articles that were cut out and collected by various people for this project. Since I have this great talent for language I was able to read the articles in three different languages.
It’s like making an identification with other readers that are there in the audience?
If I don’t have anything specific to do I read several papers a day sometimes, travelling … in airports. I like it because you skip from one thing to another, through sections. Some people start at the back with the sports. It’s also nice if you’re travelling somewhere different and you’re not familiar how a paper is divided, you just go from Health to Crime to Sports to Politics to Culture, I like that. I was also invited by Jacob to include my own clippings, the articles I cut out had very specific things in them, but more than this I also wanted to create a seemingly random trajectory, going from this to that. I have the impression articles are getting shorter. If you read something like Frankfurter Allgemeine with articles that will sometimes stretch from one page to continue on another, then you might read something else in between. I wanted to share that random non-linear type of logic as part of the performance.
It seemed to have something to do time too, old articles now, you also read in a way with a kind of lagging or sagging in your delivery.
If I had been a professional news reporter it would have lacked something, I was just trying to find another way of using these articles. Yes the readings are from 2004 and 5 and it’s a contradiction to read them. With television it’s somehow seen as something useful to keep yourself updated. If you’re reading from two years ago, it doesn’t make sense anymore and I quite like that. It’s senseless to read something that was full of meaning. Also this exhibition room is overloaded, with a normal painting show you could see everything in twenty minutes but you could be stuck here for a week to read everything. This is another kind of sagging or gagging or whatever you said.
Yes, it seemed like this exhibition and reading was offering the beginning of tools to deal with the excess of information and articles that we are all living with?
There was a threat I might go on for hours, but it was quite manageable time-wise. It was stretched enough to give that impression without actually doing it.
Did you figure an audience in this performance?
Artists have a popular role historically as crazy people, yet this newspaper craziness goes beyond that of artists. Especially older men, like in retirement, maybe younger women, have a craze of cutting and collecting articles, I’m not sure if they know about this exhibition, but people are widely aware of and understand it as an activity and process. It’s a conceptual work without that specific conceptual art context that could prove to be alienating to those already in the article cutting group or activity. It can be anybody, initiated or not, everybody is welcome.
back to SPEECH
posted by speech at 1:17 AM
1 Comments:
I like the sound of this project, its like making your own remix of the news. Was the audience able to make their own newspapers too? The way we can select what bits of information we will consume and what we will skim over is the little bit of power we each have as editors of our own information intake. I have a friend who collects and files news and magazine articles prolifically, her spare room is full of them, cross-referenced by topic and who she knows who might appreciate it - like if she sees a nice picture of motorbikes she might keep it for her Dad. But I don't know if she ever gets round to sending them to anyone.
Also, my grandparents have a friend who lives one street over, he's old like them and between their various ailments and old fashioned slightly reclusive habits, they don't often see each other. But about once a week he'll leave an envelope of clippings in their letterbox. Usually stuff about the war or home (they are all Scottish immigrants now living in New Zealand) that my grandparents don't really want to think about. But it's his way of keeping some kind of connection.
It doesn't seem to matter too much if the news is old, last night on TV there was an entertainment programme showing "highlights" from the news from the year 2001. ("What a Year - The Aussie girl who became a star, the mullet which wasn't a fish and the day the world changed forever.")
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